May 5, 2009

A helpful release at the start of the US Sentencing Commission's data conference

As previously blogged here, the United States Sentencing Commission is conducting a multi-day data and research conference, which started today. Not coincidentally, I suspect, one can now find this new publication on the USSC's website:

Introduction to the Collection of Individual Offender Data by the United States Sentencing Commission: This report introduces the process the United States Sentencing Commission uses to create its fiscal year individual offender datafiles from documents submitted to the Commission. Issues surrounding the use of differing form types and conflicting information among documents are also addressed. The report is designed to help researchers use the Commission’s datafiles by providing answers to common data analysis questions.